ceautery

Automattic was the most bizarre collection of chucklefucks I've ever had the displeasure of interacting with. They contracted with me to write a Wordpress plugin that would import Flickr libraries, which would have bankrupted anyone with a significantly large image set based on wordpress.com's pricing back in the Obama years.

I never spoke to a single human being when I worked for them, and all of my technical questions in their Skype dev channel went unanswered. It feels insane to me that this is still a functioning company.

I like the idea. As others have noted, some of the map placements are wrong. For example, the Glendale Ohio cam is placed in Glendale Arizona. Easy to patch up, and a fun idea. Good job!

Yesterday it was 100%

It seems like somewhere in there he could have explained the acronym.

If I worked for PayPal right now I'd be printing résumés. Stripe recently laid off 300 of their IT people. To paraphrase Petey Greene, I wouldn't trust them to wash my car.

That's a perfectly valid reason.

I tried AoC out one year with the Wolfram language, which sounds insane now, but back then it was just a "seemed like the thing to do at the time" and I'm glad I did it.

Stumbling across this over a week later, and yes, the clock is correct now.

LinkedIn is by far the worst offender in post previews. The doctype tag must be all lowercase. The HTML document must be well-formed (the meta tags must be in an explicit <head> block, for example). You must have OG meta tags for url, title, type, and image. The url meta tag gets visited, even if it's the same address the inspector is already looking at.

Fortunately, the post inspector helps you suss out what's missing in some cases, but c'mon, man, how much effort should I spend helping a social media site figure out how to render a preview? Once you get it right, and to quote my 13 year old: "We have arrived, father... but at what cost?"

What's up with the clock? Mine was two minutes off of local system time.

Neat, this is the first project I've seen in the wild that uses astro.

You're in good company, Paul Graham's site does as well.

https://paulgraham.com/index.html

I'm in the "old-ass blogger.com site" category, with posts going back to '05.

You're calling frameworks with two day old commits critical and terminal? As Mark Twain would say, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

This brings back memories. I developed the "JoTrivia" mIRC script back around 2000/2001 as a way to kill time when I worked nighttime tech support and got maybe two calls a night. The scripting language syntax was completely bonkers, e.g.,

on *:JOIN:%jt.triv.chan:{ .notice $nick Welcome $nick! }

Loads of fun, though, and IRC was nice venue back then to build a community out of strangers who had similar blocks of free time.

Comma and period to strafe.

It was one of my favorites back in the 1980s. It was a followup to Gödel Escher Bach, written in much the same style.

I never thought of this before now, but tech from 1977 might not even be using ASCII.

This reminds me of Vi Hart's hyperbolic dress. It's not too similar to the knit dress here, just vaguely mathy + clothing.

That's stolen from "Untitled Goose Game".

Pufftygraph [1]

I wrote a Spirograph clone that worked on an iPhone as a Christmas present for my 6 year old, mainly because back then I couldn't find any existing clones where you could drag the gears around to draw, and I thought it would be a fun coding exercise.

It got me over the line in a job interview at the first startup I worked for. Spirographs and toy web apps had nothing to do with the job, but it was a quick way to demonstrate "chops" to the engineering team, in what was otherwise a disaster of an all-day interview.

I was sick, and tried to reschedule the interview, but the company had planned their whole day around me being there, and the CEO was going to travel for vacation afterwards. I put on a brave face and talked with the CEO, then the tech founders, but I was becoming more and more listless as the day went on.

The engineering team took me out for lunch and beers. We sat outside, and I was facing the sun, feeling like hell, and after the first beer I was in no way able to think technically. Rather than invert a binary tree, or whatever they were asking me about, I shifted the conversation to kids and apps, and passed my phone around for them to all play with the Pufftygraph controls and draw some hypotrochoids.

Some combination of sympathy for someone obviously dead on their feet but still trying, and the app, was enough to get my foot in the door. I had a good time there, but if I had it to do over again, I would have just cancelled since they were so inflexible. Now in the post-covid world, the idea of inviting someone sick to breathe all over your team for a day sounds insane.

[1] https://cautery.blogspot.com/2012/12/pufftygraph-html5-spiro...

I worked under a blind manager when the iPhone first came out. He was a former dev before his vision started to go. He was a power user while blind, and knew twice as many hot keys as I did, had his screen reader speed cranked up to a rate incomprehensible to me.

I remember how happy he was with the iPhone. He said it was the first device he was able to use without special accessibility software, and that was in 2007, I imagine the experience is better today.

I’m sure you’re (OP) already on the ball with ways to help him, but if you haven’t looked into movies with described audio, apparently it makes a whale of a difference.

Modem manufacturers were between a rock and a hard place back then. It was already expensive to have hardware chips that supported every available connection protocol, and the extra horsepower you needed to support, say, BTLZ error correction had to come from somewhere. So either add more hardware to the modem, or offload that work to the slow computer CPUs of the late 90s (when Winmodems first came out) which weren't up for the task.

I was in tech support when winmodems first hit the scene. The best I could do for my users then was to configure their init strings to use "buffered async" mode (&Q6 on an RPI modem, I forget what it was for the Sportster winmodems) instead of error correction.

Unrelated, poor Shawn. I wish I could have jumped on a 10 minute phone call with him back then to troubleshoot his external modem before he started spamming the forum and got himself banned.

It rotates the path so that the first point is to the right of center mass. See https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/gesture-recognition-...

This style of writing feels a lot like the sections of Gödel Escher Bach that had the tortoise and Achilles dialogues.

Anyway, I’m 52 and have been typing daily at tech jobs since 1995. I had a run-in with RSI around 2000, and tried ergonomic aids like a squishy pad in front of my keyboard to rest my wrists on, this sliding thing that I rested my elbows on. None of it made a lick of difference.

I changed the way I typed. I made sure to keep my hands and wrists relaxed, and swapped out stretching my fingers for keys with sliding my arms around… and it worked.

I still type a lot every day, and I’ve been pain free for 20 years. YMMV, obviously, but changing how you use your arms and hands might be a huge boon.

> He puts his birthdate in a password

I imagine that date is in a lot of Russian passwords. That was the day of the '91 coup attempt against Gorbachev.

BVO has other consequences not mentioned in this article. I consumed Mountain Dew daily from ages 15 - 35, and quit cold-turkey after I learned about BVO's link to memory loss, since I had started to struggle with remembering words I didn't use frequently.

The effects lasted for about a decade, and I still occasionally have to do an association memory exercise to pluck out a word. It's rare now, and normally only happens when I'm sleepy or I've been drinking.

Pepsico poisoned me, happily filling their drinks with chemicals that have been banned in Europe for my entire life. But boy they had some fun commercials.

I'd like to see a collection of pronunciation blind-spots, where people mispronounce words in the same way. E.g., the extra "ar" syllable we put in "narrator", and Ohioans who pronounce Bellefontaine as "bell-fountain", as though it had a "u" in it somewhere.

I'm glad the article had a plot of the bird's path. It looks almost like a hypotrochoid that you could draw with a Spirograph set.

It's nice to see just how popular Hilbert curves are. For me it touches the same nerve that Conway's Game of Life does.

I threw together a hacky demo of the Hilbert curve and some other l-system curve for a middle school computer club I ran way back when. Not the best UI in the world, but it shows you either the string substitutions following each l-system ruleset, or with "show canvas" checked each click draws the next generation.

https://autery.net/pages/l-systems.html

Off topic, but Laser Blast was a great 2600 game. The ground stayed "hot" after you shot it, so a near miss could be a kill if the enemy rolled into the hot zone. The controls were modal - you could move your ship around with the stick, or hold the fire button down and aim your laser, which fired when you let go of the button. Creative work by the Activision devs.